Without thinking too much I would say the ratio between good and bad. But if I really had to choose one or the other I think the presence of good is more accurate, because it seems to me that people willingly go through many bad things to get good things, or are willing to endure many bad things they didn’t choose in the hope for good things.
It is obviously the presence of good. As the absence of bad would make it not bad instead of good. This is just framing bad grammar as a philosophical question. When we use words with intent and stick to largely agreed upon meanings, we can rid ourselves of the trivial ponderances like this one that plague philosophy subs.
Edit:
To expand on that a bit more we could ask:
What makes something red? Is it the presence of red or absence of blue?
When asked in this way, it is obvious that the presence of red is necessary unless we redefine red as anything absent of blue.
To be fair, even ancient greek philosophers sometimes struggled with, separating linguistic things from metaphysics. This often happens, when people speak only one language.
But red is the absence of other colors besides red.
Excuse the wordiness, but my intuitive and immediate answer to this, after a couple of ales, is that good and bad are not discrete and binary but are usually a continuum of the same value judgement or quantities of the same thing:
Five strawberries - tasty, ten strawberries - meh, fifty strawberries - feeling a bit sick.
An occasional and considered compliment - kind, constant praise - sycophantic and obsequious.
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” - some dude quoted in Civ 4
Absence of bad.
Neither. A thing (or person) cannot be intrinsically good or bad. They can have good or bad qualities.
